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Book Review
| Joseph A. Ranney, In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Pp. x + 199. $49.95 (ISBN 0-275-98972-0).
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| In 1984, David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely, Jr. published Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South, which dared historians to integrate the southern states into the narrative of American legal history. Nearly a quarter century later, apart from the law of slavery, we still know little about the history of substantive law in the American South. State statutes, judicial decisions, and constitutions from the region remain underutilized. The literature on the Reconstruction period, in particular, focuses almost exclusively on national developments, rather than changes that occurred at the state level. In this slim volume, Joseph A. Ranney contributes to our knowledge of the Reconstruction era at the same time that he adds to our overall understanding of southern legal history. His book covers a variety of topics—from federalism, to debtor relief, to women's rights—but his boldest claim is that southern law during the late nineteenth century helped lay a foundation for the civil rights reforms of the mid-twentieth century. |
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Ranney's survey can be divided into three parts. The early chapters provide an overview of the changing social and legal landscape of the South before and during the Civil War. The southern states differed widely, he shows, in terms of their antebellum social, economic, and political development—all of which shaped the makeup of their supreme courts and their ultimate experiences of war and reconstruction. During wartime the Confederate states confronted legal controversy over conscription, and immediately after the war all southern state supreme courts heard cases involving loyalty oaths, suffrage rights, and amnesty for acts committed during wartime. In the early chapters, Ranney also introduces some of the judicial leaders who figured prominently during the era. Whether native southern Unionists or northern outsiders, Ranney argues, southern judges exhibited a conservative nationalism that connected them to broader trends in the American legal community. |
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The bulk of the book explores the legal and constitutional issues that the South confronted during Reconstruction. On the most important of these questions— emancipation and civil rights—Ranney offers interesting insights. He describes the little-known legislative attempts within the Border States to secure compensation for former slaveholders, for example, and shows how state courts took different approaches in assessing the validity of slave sale contracts that extended beyond 1865. He outlines the history of the black codes, as well as the subsequent response of the national government, and concludes that, as much as they attempted to preserve the slave system, the codes "extended a small core of basic civil rights to blacks and added some additional protections" (61). Ranney notes, for example, that several states allowed blacks to testify in both civil and criminal cases. Furthermore, even provisions designed to control black labor required employment contracts to be in writing and to be explained to illiterate laborers. Such protections, he argues, "provided a small opening for free-labor values and eventual acceptance of blacks as full human beings with full civil rights" (62). On matters other than black rights, Reconstruction-era southern state constitutions proved to be vital mechanisms for reform. All but three constitutions of former Confederate states provided for common school systems. Five ex-Confederate states provided for homestead exemptions for debtors in their post-war constitutions, while eight constitutionally established the property rights of married women. Although a subsequent wave of constitutional revision swept the South when the "redeemers" came to power, these reforms remained intact. |
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The final chapters examine southern legal history up to 1915 and assess the "legal legacy of Reconstruction." Ranney deftly describes developments during the "Straight-Out Era," during which southern states disfranchised blacks and established a system of segregation that pervaded nearly every aspect of society. From the whitening of southern juries to the imposing of residential segregation ordinances, Ranney shows how the first years of the century truly marked the low point of the legal status of African Americans. Still, he concludes by arguing for the need to view Reconstruction in context—as occurring after two hundred fifty years of slavery. The legal changes during Reconstruction, he notes, "forced white southerners to view blacks for the first time as fully human beings" (158). Southern state judges, although they never expanded black rights, demonstrated a commitment to the rule of law by legally enforcing the basic rights granted by legislatures. |
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Ranney successfully outlines the broad contours of southern legal development during the fifty years after the Civil War. Because he covers a broad swath of time and a range of issues, Ranney's analysis at times seems superficial. Still, he offers some important insights: the notion that southern states judges were committed to legalism and nationalism, the apparent continuity between northern and southern law with regard to corporations and creditor-debtor relations, and the role of Reconstruction constitutions in advancing reform. In short, by reminding us how little we really know about law in the southern states, Ranney's book aptly demonstrates the need for continued research. |
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| Timothy S. Huebner
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| Rhodes College |
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